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Distinguished speakers at the event included Wally Liaw, Senior Vice President and Co-Founder of Supermicro, Vivian Lien, Vice President and General Manager of Intel's CCG, and Shih-Chia Hsiao, Founder and CEO of Acepodia, Inc. Taiwan Tech Summit 2023 ...

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Distinguished speakers at the event included Wally Liaw, Senior Vice President and Co-Founder of Supermicro, Vivian Lien, Vice President and General Manager of Intel's CCG, and Shih-Chia Hsiao, Founder and CEO of Acepodia, Inc. Katie Hsieh, the Chair of ...

ALAMEDA, Calif. and TAIPEI, Sept. 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Acepodia, a clinical stage biotechnology company developing first-in-class cell therapies with its unique Antibody-Cell Conjugation (ACC ...

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Car­olyn Bertozzi helped kin­dle the spark that be­came cell ther­a­py biotech Ace­po­dia while the com­pa­ny’s co-founder, Son­ny Hsiao, was still a PhD stu­dent, work­ing in ...

No­bel lau­re­ate Car­olyn Bertozzi joins cell ther­a­py biotech Ace­po­dia as chief sci­en­tif­ic ad­vi­sor

Acepodia

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Meet the Winners of Startups in North and Central America

THE ART OF RELIGION

Human, All Too Human,  A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Nietzsche is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series . The table of Links for this book can be found here . PREFACE 1 It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, from the "Birth of Tragedy" to the recently published "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future": they all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs. What!? Everything is merely—human—all too human? With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply misrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, still more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timely advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and challenger of God; and whosoever has experienced any of the consequences of such deep distrust, anything of the chills and the agonies of isolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemns him endowed with it, will also understand how often I must have sought relief and self-forgetfulness from any source—through any object of veneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness; also why I, when I could not find what I was in need of, had to fashion it for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet or writer has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all the art in the world possibly have?) That which I always stood most in need of in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enough not to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point of view—a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship and equality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free from suspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals, superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of color, skin and seeming. Perhaps I could be fairly reproached with much "art" in this regard, many fine counterfeitings; for example, that, wisely or willfully, I had shut my eyes to Schopenhauer's blind will towards ethic, at a time when I was already clear sighted enough on the subject of ethic; likewise that I had deceived myself concerning Richard Wagner's incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an end; likewise concerning the Greeks, likewise concerning the Germans and their future—and there may be, perhaps, a long list of such likewise. Granted, however, that all this were true, and with justice urged against me, what does it signify, what can it signify in regard to how much of the self-sustaining capacity, how much of reason and higher protection are embraced in such self-deception? —and how much more falsity is still necessary to me that I may therewith always reassure myself regarding the luxury of my truth. Enough, I still live; and life is not considered now apart from ethic; it will [have] deception; it thrives (lebt) on deception ... but am I not beginning to do all over again what I have always done, I, the old immoralist, and bird snarer—talk unmorally, ultramorally, "beyond good and evil"? 2 Thus, then, have I evolved for myself the "free spirits" to whom this discouraging-encouraging work, under the general title "Human, All Too Human," is dedicated. Such "free spirits" do not really exist and never did exist. But I stood in need of them, as I have pointed out, in order that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness, strangeness, acedia, incapacity): to serve as gay spirits and comrades, with whom one may talk and laugh when one is disposed to talk and laugh, and whom one may send to the devil when they grow wearisome. They are some compensation for the lack of friends. That such free spirits can possibly exist, that our Europe will yet number among her sons of to-morrow or of the day after to-morrow, such a brilliant and enthusiastic company, alive and palpable and not merely, as in my case, fantasms and imaginary shades, I, myself, can by no means doubt. I see them already coming, slowly, slowly. May it not be that I am doing a little something to expedite their coming when I describe in advance the influences under which I see them evolving and the ways along which they travel? 3 It may be conjectured that a soul in which the type of "free spirit" can attain maturity and completeness had its decisive and deciding event in the form of a great emancipation or unbinding, and that prior to that event it seemed only the more firmly and forever chained to its place and pillar. What binds strongest? What cords seem almost unbreakable? In the case of mortals of a choice and lofty nature they will be those of duty: that reverence, which in youth is most typical, that timidity and tenderness in the presence of the traditionally honored and the worthy, that gratitude to the soil from which we sprung, for the hand that guided us, for the relic before which we were taught to pray—their sublimest moments will themselves bind these souls most strongly. The great liberation comes suddenly to such prisoners, like an earthquake: the young soul is all at once shaken, torn apart, cast forth—it comprehends not itself what is taking place. An involuntary onward impulse rules them with the mastery of command; a will, a wish are developed to go forward, anywhere, at any price; a strong, dangerous curiosity regarding an undiscovered world flames and flashes in all their being. "Better to die than live here"—so sounds the tempting voice: and this "here," this "at home" constitutes all they have hitherto loved. A sudden dread and distrust of that which they loved, a flash of contempt for that which is called their "duty," a mutinous, wilful, volcanic-like longing for a far away journey, strange scenes and people, annihilation, petrifaction, a hatred surmounting love, perhaps a sacrilegious impulse and look backwards, to where they so long prayed and loved, perhaps a flush of shame for what they did and at the same time an exultation at having done it, an inner, intoxicating, delightful tremor in which is betrayed the sense of victory—a victory? over what? over whom? a riddle-like victory, fruitful in questioning and well worth questioning, but the first victory, for all—such things of pain and ill belong to the history of the great liberation. And it is at the same time a malady that can destroy a man, this first outbreak of strength and will for self-destination, self-valuation, this will for free will: and how much illness is forced to the surface in the frantic strivings and singularities with which the freedman, the liberated seeks henceforth to attest his mastery over things! He roves fiercely around, with an unsatisfied longing and whatever objects he may encounter must suffer from the perilous expectancy of his pride; he tears to pieces whatever attracts him. With a sardonic laugh he overturns whatever he finds veiled or protected by any reverential awe: he would see what these things look like when they are overturned. It is wilfulness and delight in the wilfulness of it, if he now, perhaps, gives his approval to that which has heretofore been in ill repute—if, in curiosity and experiment, he penetrates stealthily to the most forbidden things. In the background during all his plunging and roaming—for he is as restless and aimless in his course as if lost in a wilderness—is the interrogation mark of a curiosity growing ever more dangerous. "Can we not upset every standard? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an invention and a subtlety of the devil? Is everything, in the last resort, false? And if we are dupes are we not on that very account dupers also? must we not be dupers also?" Such reflections lead and mislead him, ever further on, ever further away. Solitude, that dread goddess and mater saeva cupidinum, encircles and besets him, ever more threatening, more violent, more heart breaking—but who to-day knows what solitude is? 4 From this morbid solitude, from the deserts of such trial years, the way is yet far to that great, overflowing certainty and healthiness which cannot dispense even with sickness as a means and a grappling hook of knowledge; to that matured freedom of the spirit which is, in an equal degree, self mastery and discipline of the heart, and gives access to the path of much and various reflection—to that inner comprehensiveness and self satisfaction of over-richness which precludes all danger that the spirit has gone astray even in its own path and is sitting intoxicated in some corner or other; to that overplus of plastic, healing, imitative and restorative power which is the very sign of vigorous health, that overplus which confers upon the free spirit the perilous prerogative of spending a life in experiment and of running adventurous risks: the past-master-privilege of the free spirit. In the interval there may be long years of convalescence, years filled with many hued painfully-bewitching transformations, dominated and led to the goal by a tenacious will for health that is often emboldened to assume the guise and the disguise of health. There is a middle ground to this, which a man of such destiny can not subsequently recall without emotion; he basks in a special fine sun of his own, with a feeling of birdlike freedom, birdlike visual power, birdlike irrepressibleness, a something extraneous (Drittes) in which curiosity and delicate disdain have united. A "free spirit"—this refreshing term is grateful in any mood, it almost sets one aglow. One lives—no longer in the bonds of love and hate, without a yes or no, here or there indifferently, best pleased to evade, to avoid, to beat about, neither advancing nor retreating. One is habituated to the bad, like a person who all at once sees a fearful hurly-burly beneath him—and one was the counterpart of him who bothers himself with things that do not concern him. As a matter of fact the free spirit is bothered with mere things—and how many things—which no longer concern him. 5 A step further in recovery: and the free spirit draws near to life again, slowly indeed, almost refractorily, almost distrustfully. There is again warmth and mellowness: feeling and fellow feeling acquire depth, lambent airs stir all about him. He almost feels: it seems as if now for the first time his eyes are open to things near. He is in amaze and sits hushed: for where had he been? These near and immediate things: how changed they seem to him! He looks gratefully back—grateful for his wandering, his self exile and severity, his lookings afar and his bird flights in the cold heights. How fortunate that he has not, like a sensitive, dull home body, remained always "in the house" and "at home!" He had been beside himself, beyond a doubt. Now for the first time he really sees himself—and what surprises in the process. What hitherto unfelt tremors! Yet what joy in the exhaustion, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How it delights him, suffering, to sit still, to exercise patience, to lie in the sun! Who so well as he appreciates the fact that there comes balmy weather even in winter, who delights more in the sunshine athwart the wall? They are the most appreciative creatures in the world, and also the most humble, these convalescents and lizards, crawling back towards life: there are some among them who can let no day slip past them without addressing some song of praise to its retreating light. And speaking seriously, it is a fundamental cure for all pessimism (the cankerous vice, as is well known, of all idealists and humbugs), to become ill in the manner of these free spirits, to remain ill quite a while and then bit by bit grow healthy—I mean healthier. It is wisdom, worldly wisdom, to administer even health to oneself for a long time in small doses. 6 About this time it becomes at last possible, amid the flash lights of a still unestablished, still precarious health, for the free, the ever freer spirit to begin to read the riddle of that great liberation, a riddle which has hitherto lingered, obscure, well worth questioning, almost impalpable, in his memory. If once he hardly dared to ask "why so apart? so alone? renouncing all I loved? renouncing respect itself? why this coldness, this suspicion, this hate for one's very virtues?"—now he dares, and asks it loudly, already hearing the answer, "you had to become master over yourself, master of your own good qualities. Formerly they were your masters: but they should be merely your tools along with other tools. You had to acquire power over your aye and no and learn to hold and withhold them in accordance with your higher aims. You had to grasp the perspective of every representation (Werthschätzung)—the dislocation, distortion and the apparent end or teleology of the horizon, besides whatever else appertains to the perspective: also the element of demerit in its relation to opposing merit, and the whole intellectual cost of every affirmative, every negative. You had to find out the inevitable error in every Yes and in every No, error as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the perspective and its inaccuracy. Above all, you had to see with your own eyes where the error is always greatest: there, namely, where life is littlest, narrowest, meanest, least developed and yet cannot help looking upon itself as the goal and standard of things, and smugly and ignobly and incessantly tearing to tatters all that is highest and greatest and richest, and putting the shreds into the form of questions from the standpoint of its own well being. You had to see with your own eyes the problem of classification, (Rangordnung, regulation concerning rank and station) and how strength and sweep and reach of perspective wax upward together: You had"—enough, the free spirit knows henceforward which "you had" it has obeyed and also what it now can do and what it now, for the first time, dare. 1 1 1 Ungerechtigkeit, literally wrongfulness, injustice, unrighteousness. 1 7 Accordingly, the free spirit works out for itself an answer to that riddle of its liberation and concludes by generalizing upon its experience in the following fashion: "What I went through everyone must go through" in whom any problem is germinated and strives to body itself forth. The inner power and inevitability of this problem will assert themselves in due course, as in the case of any unsuspected pregnancy—long before the spirit has seen this problem in its true aspect and learned to call it by its right name. Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day. Granted, that it is the problem of classification of which we free spirits may say, this is our problem, yet it is only now, in the midday of our life, that we fully appreciate what preparations, shifts, trials, ordeals, stages, were essential to that problem before it could emerge to our view, and why we had to go through the various and contradictory longings and satisfactions of body and soul, as circumnavigators and adventurers of that inner world called "man"; as surveyors of that "higher" and of that "progression" that is also called "man"—crowding in everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing, missing nothing, testing everything, sifting everything and eliminating the chance impurities—until at last we could say, we free spirits: "Here—a new problem! Here, a long ladder on the rungs of which we ourselves have rested and risen, which we have actually been at times. Here is a something higher, a something deeper, a something below us, a vastly extensive order, (Ordnung) a comparative classification (Rangordnung), that we perceive: here—ourproblem!" 2 3 Rangordnung: the meaning is "the problem of grasping the relative importance of things." 2 Uebereinander: one over another. 3 8 To what stage in the development just outlined the present book belongs (or is assigned) is something that will be hidden from no augur or psychologist for an instant. But where are there psychologists to-day? In France, certainly; in Russia, perhaps; certainly not in Germany. Grounds are not wanting, to be sure, upon which the Germans of to-day may adduce this fact to their credit: unhappily for one who in this matter is fashioned and mentored in an un-German school! This Germanbook, which has found its readers in a wide circle of lands and peoples—it has been some ten years on its rounds—and which must make its way by means of any musical art and tune that will captivate the foreign ear as well as the native—this book has been read most indifferently in Germany itself and little heeded there: to what is that due? "It requires too much," I have been told, "it addresses itself to men free from the press of petty obligations, it demands fine and trained perceptions, it requires a surplus, a surplus of time, of the lightness of heaven and of the heart, of otium in the most unrestricted sense: mere good things that we Germans of to-day have not got and therefore cannot give." After so graceful a retort, my philosophy bids me be silent and ask no more questions: at times, as the proverb says, one remains a philosopher only because one says—nothing! Nice, Spring, 1886. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (November 26, 2011). HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN, A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved DECEMBER 7, 2021, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38145/38145-h/38145-h.htm#PREFACE This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

Of The First and Last Things: Part 2

Facebook, Financial Crises And The Corrosion of Society Ev on Unsplash.com I fear the Day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots -Einstein/Powder (1995) This week, Facebook’s CEO faced two days of intense questioning from members of the US Congress about Facebook’s inability to protect the privacy of its users data. I must confess I am a social media addict. The immediate gratification, that the red notification symbol on Facebook or the retweet of my tweets on Twitter offers, is second to none. I am hooked along with many in this day and age. From Snapchat to Musical.ly, I have an account on literally every popular social media platform. All of these observations combined with Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before congress led me to an examination of my own crude behavior. I am sure a lot of people share my angst. I do not know if a statutory warning that says “social media addiction is injurious to health” will be enough to deter our excessive indulgences but I do know that our behavior can corrode the foundations of social relationships. Sharing every moment of our lives may lead not just to loss of privacy but also the loss of our humanity. This article looks at how businesses and ultimately society can be driven by the seven deadly sins. From time immemorial, these sins represent primordial instincts that will never go away. They can just be managed and balanced. Without self regulation, the outcome of societies and entire civilizations is not hard to imagine. Greed The list of financial crises is a timeline of greed peaking at various times in human history. We go from greed to restraint to greed again. The disturbing trend is that the number of bubbles across the world is increasing. The Economist The biggest global contagion the world has witnessed in recent history is the global financial crisis of 2008–09. By the end of 2009, half of the world was in recession. Wikipedia: World map showing real GDP growth rates for 2009 (Countries in brown were in recession.) The greed to profit from subprime mortgages engulfed not only banks but countries, rating businesses, the middle class, the taxpayers, and workers around the world. Bloomberg/NYTimes The after effects of the 2008 crisis still linger on. As per a McKinsey survey in 2017, asset bubbles have emerged as one of the top risk to country growth especially in developing countries. Developing countries also have a very vulnerable middle class that relies heavily on debt and typically has lower savings especially when real inflation outstrips wage increases. McKinsey Economic Conditions Snapshot, Sept. 2017 While there is a lot of literature on the 2008 Financial Crisis, I would recommend reading the and the to learn more about the crisis. The Financial Crisis Commission Report Squam Lake Report Envy Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a modern day euphemism for envy. The crypto currency frenzy in 2017 resulted in rampant speculation in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO’s) in general. China had to ban ICO’s because tokens became the passport for paper tiger businesses to raise money. Even without any business model whatsoever, a white paper became the prospectus for an ICO. When investors look at their neighbors becoming billionaires overnight, envy pushes many a soul to gamble hard earned money for explicitly speculative goals. As is the case with any new and disruptive technology, smart investors pull out their capital leaving the average joe with worthless assets and a future faced with destitution. It is hard to affix blame on Ponzi scheme operators because they cannot thrive without human envy. The sooner we understand that there are no free lunches, the better. While ICO’s raised a total of $5.6 billion in 2017, many investors lost money due to FOMO or envy. It is also true that tokens, overall returned 12.8x the investment compared to 7.7x for Ethereum and 4.9x for Bitcoin (businessinsider.com), the overall story masks individual reality. Businessinsider.com In college, I interned at an equity research firm for a few months. I would walk through Dalal Street (Mumbai’s equivalent of Wall Street) and hear stories of people who mortgaged their house to gamble in stocks. The outcome, as you can guess, was never good. Lust An entire industry runs on lust ( Countless magazines depend on lust. Websites that promote the pursuit of ‘Sugar Daddies’ to pay off student loans thrive along with websites that promote married men to have affairs. by some estimates, a $97 billion juggernaut) Some might say all of these business keep marriages from breaking apart. While there may truth in that argument in some cases, lust drives a lot of movies, magazines and an entire industry. Most of all, it has driven the oldest profession in the world through the ages. For all business bound by sin with their clientele, it’s hard to make even a small moral argument. But then again, it upon humanity to make the right choices. Sloth The word “sloth” is a translation of the Latin term acedia (Middle English, accidie) and means “without care”. Sloth is the hardest sin to define but can be viewed as unwillingness to exert oneself. It is also synonymous with not working, laziness and idleness. In the modern world, not exerting enough in the right direction or lack of discipline to do the right thing are good examples of sloth. Mental exertion can take many forms such as reading about complex ideas or reading extensively in general ie depriving the mind of healthy nourishment. Physical sloth can mean not exercising, working hard and not putting enough effort. To my mind, watching excessive entertainment and idling away time without physical exertion are clear examples of my laziness. Taken to its extreme, it may mean not willing to earn money for family or abdicating basic duties as a member of the family. For instance, nobody knows how many jobs Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take away through automation. However, what I see as sloth on my side is not doing anything to reskill myself for the new world order. Gluttony Gluttony included excessive indulgences of any kind ie sugar, fat, alcohol, opioids or other controlled substances especially damaging to the youth of any country. OECD.org Although gluttony is defined with respect to food and there are many victims of overeating, the modern world has seen something more sinister and that is addiction. Wrath While all out conventional war is inconceivable and assures total destruction, the world always seems to be swinging between diplomacy and saber rattling. In addition to countless lives lost, the severe economic burden of war is unimaginable. Anger comes in many shades.To me, getting angry at loved ones, using inappropriate language and posting negative comments on social media that publicly display my anger are all forms of wrath. Pride In Greek mythology, Narcissus’ undoing was that he fell in love with his own reflection. The modern day equivalent is being smitten with our own image on Facebook waiting for those likes to pour in. To my mind, my display of narcissism has surpassed my need to stay connected with my friends and family. Truth be told, I don’t need Facebook to stay connected to my closest friends and family. We have to collectively assess if all of us are caught in the same warp of comparing our lives to others and highlighting the times we feel superior and then pasting those photos on Facebook. I don’t remember having opened an album of old family photographs or even an old high school photo and smiling. However, I do remember feeling like Narcissus each time I open Facebook to admire my supposedly perfect life by looking at my most liked photographs. I keep asking myself these questions in no particular order: is this why I post on Facebook? Are my narcissistic tendencies getting the best of me? Is this what everyone does today? Are we sharing every single moment of our life just to realize they were not private? Rather, they were data points and the lifeblood of marketeers exploiting my narcissism to create a never ending cycle of consumerism. Honestly, I don’t have an answer. While Mark Zuckerberg was testifying before congress, I realized that a part of the blame lies on me for sharing every data point in my life. That there are no guarantees of privacy was always my default assumption. Don’t Argue With The Devil When the balance in a business tilts towards one of the seven deadly sins, our behavior that drives that business has passed the tipping point of humanity. When a society becomes a collection of such actions driven by sin, that society faces an imminent collapse. I am not a doomsday prophet. However, my own mistakes scare me. The darkness inside me comes out often enough for me to wonder about the collective future of humanity. Hubris and hedonism have been a human trait since time began. What is needed time and again is self control. Pope Francis, the Argentinian Pontiff, advised people to not argue with the devil. The devil is much more intelligent than us and will win. The Telegraph (UK) reported Pope Francis saying: “He is evil, he’s not like mist. He’s not a diffuse thing, he is a person. I’m convinced that one must never converse with Satan — if you do that, you’ll be lost,” he told TV2000, a Catholic channel, gesticulating with his hands to emphasise his point” Pope Francis’ words ring true in my mind each time I decide to indulge in comparison with other people, entertain negative thoughts or think bad thoughts in general. The problem with conversing with the devil is that it is a slippery path. He always wins and the lure of sin becomes too powerful to overcome. Treasure The Conscience I am not certain that Seven Sins, Inc. could overshadow global GDP which is estimated to be around $85 trillion. That is because it is a dark, empty place devoid of humanity. Also, toll on society and human lives cannot be quantified. It is certainly higher than the collateral damage i.e. the monetary value of our actions. My intention behind writing this article is not to criticize Facebook or any other business for that matter. I don’t have any authority or expertise to do so. My intention is to curb my own unbridled pursuit of some of the seven deadly sins through self criticism which begins with curbing my narcissistic tendencies on Facebook. It is also to empathize with others who feel the same way as I do. It is amazing how frequently our society faces a crisis in several different spheres. An active conscience is a great asset. I hope we treasure it because when all else is done, the onus is always on us. It is very easy to blame others for mistakes. However, it is very hard to acknowledge our role in the largest mistakes namely the financial crises or the loss of our privacy on social media. Charlie Munger says “Incentives are a superpower”. I agree. The incentive to give up indulging in the wrong behavior is to get love and respect in real life. Two things that are becoming increasingly difficult to get. Add to that, the fact that you need money to pay your bills everyday. This has been my hardest story to write because I am no expert on the wide array of topics I wrote about and the above words represent my feelings. Secondly, I am guilty of some of the sins as many would be. Finally, I leave you with these words from the great poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, on god: Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else. As they say in opera, it’s not over until the fat lady sings. Using that metaphor in real life, it is our job not to give her the microphone.

Seven Sins, Inc.

How many meetings have you had about deadlines where at least one engineer scoffed at the concept? Deadlines for software are difficult. But as a CTO, you’ll likely face a situation where you must answer the terrifying question “when will this be done?” or even worse, be given a hard deadline your team must hit no matter how unknown the scope or external factors of your project are. In this blog post, we ask three CTOs for their tips on managing deadlines. Here’s what they said: Jerry Hill, CTO at Authentic ( ) @AuthenticDgtl Jerry Hill has been working with software since 1996, after graduating from the University of Southern Missisippi. Today, he oversees the technical operations at Authentic , a full-service digital marketing agency that works with an array of Fortune 500 companies. “The most important part to meeting deadlines is having great communication with the client so that they’re able to grasp and understand processes. One of the ways I like to facilitate great communication is by understanding estimates and using them appropriately. When a project is initially scoped out, estimates are used to create an understanding of how the project will be executed. Estimates are fundamentally imprecise and even in the most rigorous of processes will prove to be inaccurate. By having great communication with the client throughout the project it can help you outline where reality isn’t lining up with expectations and make corrections to ensure goals are met. Estimates are helpful to mapping out the structure and help our team have a clear view into each project while looking ahead to see when one piece may derail or impact the schedule. With great communication, we’re able to correct course and create a solution as it happens.” Alex Malureanu, Co-Founder and CTO at Ascendia ( ) @AlexMalureanu Since Co-Founding Acendia over a decade ago, an eLearning platform, Alex Malureanu’s main role has to develop new eLearning and mLearning products for broad audiences. “When me and my team are working on projects, I have to be the one responsible for making sure that everyone is aware that a deadline is approaching. elearning If there are problems along the way, one strategy is to call an emergency meeting and discuss the major failings. That meeting might go something like: ‘What we are doing now is not working. How can we do it faster to complete the project on time?’ I also feel that a team should think long and hard about committing to a deadline from the very beginning, if it seems unreasonable. Drafting in help from other departments may help, but you also need to convey the deadline (and the strictness of it) to each member of your team so they understand that the team cannot deliver without his active participation and hard work. Communication between team leader and team members is key in those situations.” Lauri Tunnela, CTO and Co-Founder at Paranotek ( ) @WorldFlix Lauri Tunnela has over 10 years of IT experience, and now works on developing Paranotek , the cyber security and privacy software. “This is truly one of the biggest challenges in the IT industry. Especially when something completely new is being developed, like a new device hitting the consumer market, for example. Something that none of the developers have done before or have good knowledge of. In this kind of case planning and designing should be done very carefully. Also by following software development framework like Scrum, progress of a project stays stable and problems can be tackled in good time. That’s the idea, anyway!” agile The Art of Communication Communication sounds easy — but it’s where CTOs (and perhaps people in general) so often fall short. Sometimes we assume that others know what’s running through our minds, and we assume that they understand the deadline and its implications, all without us saying a word. The reality is, communication at the start of a project, as well as regular meetings with the client and your team throughout, is integral to meeting those deadlines. To complement the expert advice from the CTOs above, here are our three top tips for hitting deadlines: As mentioned, stay in close contact with your team from start to finish, on both an individual and team level. Communication: Set out a clear plan with micro-deadlines throughout your project to stay on track and measure progress. Planning: Increase accountability by making deadlines public or by raising the stakes in some shape or form. Accountability: Finally, I feel I’d be remiss to if I didn’t mention this highly relevant Bill Gates quote: “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” In other words, be careful about blindly throwing technology — like those smart home assistants and to-do list apps — at your productivity issues. If the fundamentals like communication aren’t in place, those technologies will just slow you and your team down even more. If you benefited from the expert insights from above, check out what they had to say about . writing good code How do you handle your deadlines as a CTO or developer? Let us know in the comments section below! Originally published at buttercms.com .

Three CTOs Share How They Manage Deadlines

Every day, millions of developers write code and labor through code reviews in hopes of contributing good code to the software they’re working on. But what is “good code”? With new frameworks and languages being released every month, it’s easy to forget about the fundamental qualities that make for “good code”. Sometimes it can just boil down to personal preference or documented conventions, but what else? programming We thought it’d be interesting to ask some CTO’s how they define good code: Jerry Hill, CTO at Authentic ( ) @AuthenticDgtl Jerry Hill has been working with software since 1996, after graduating from the University of Southern Missisippi. Today, he oversees the technical operations at Authentic , a full-service digital marketing agency that works with an array of Fortune 500 companies. “There’s not one thing that I can pinpoint that defines ‘Good Code’. In fact, I like to think there are five factors that should always be considered when building code: Whether you’re building a product or setting up an implementation of a product, it’s critical to understand what the code will be used for and what type of development is necessary. Application development and implementation development are very different, so it’s important to understand the desired result. You always want to make sure you avoid doing things that can create future upgrade problems or that will impact future cycle changes. Be pragmatic in everything that you do. Of the five factors, this is probably the most important. I always try to grasp a full understanding of the requirements and priorities outlined by the client to make sure that the code we build reflects the highest valued pieces. The code should read like real language. Development should always be writing code with the people in mind that will be reading it after them. So, it’s important to use strategies where you can reference variables as nouns and methods as verbs. This helps cut down on needing tons of comments and complexity in management. Follow through. The code must be well tested to ensure that it can stand the test of time.” Alex Malureanu, Co-Founder and CTO at Ascendia ( ) @AlexMalureanu Since Co-Founding Acendia over a decade ago, an eLearning platform, Alex Malureanu’s main role has to develop new eLearning and mLearning products for broad audiences. “Good code is not only about getting the task done. It’s about writing something that permits easy modification later on. After all, in today’s world, we need to modify code as much as we need to write it. That’s why, for our team, one of the most important traits of “good code” is readability. Even if it’s not using the most elegant approach or it’s buggy, the fact that you can easily read it and understand the approach of the developer makes it easier to modify, build open and delete where necessary. With readable code, you can find faster a better approach or bugs, improve it more easily and make it more elegant. Writing readable code will also improve other important aspects of it: speed for the end user, reviewability, low error rates and so forth. It is not a time consuming task and it will payback when you will read it only once to understand it, rather than reading multiple times bad code. Good code should also explain itself to anybody trying to read it, and this can usually be done by sufficient naming, structure, directionality, and so forth. Bad code, on the other hand, always has signs of duplication or is superfluous in nature, making it difficult (and annoying) to read. Alas, good code is not always void of redundancy or confusion, but it should at least keep such chaos to a minimum.” Lauri Tunnela, CTO and Co-Founder at Paranotek ( ) @WorldFlix Lauri Tunnela has over 10 years of IT experience, and now works on developing Paranotek , the cyber security and privacy software. “First of all, I always recommend following the coding standards and conventions of whatever programming language is being used. This may sound like obvious advice, but many developers go wrong here. By following the the pre-set standards, code will stay clean and readable, making it easy for anyone to read it or produce completely new code on top of it. If you start to deviate from those coding standards, you make life difficult for anybody collaborating with you. Most of the IDEs support code linters which will actually tell a programmer if they are not following the standards specific to a language being used. Also, some IDEs even automatically reformat code in case it is badly formatted. I’ve found those tools to be very helpful, but I always recommend that developers should try their best to learn from those corrections, instead of just relying on them totally. Secondly, when coding standards and conventions are being followed, it is very important that everyone in a project or company follows suit. The last thing you want is everybody coding in a slightly different way. Thirdly, even if everyone is following the same standards and conventions, this does not guarantee the quality of the code. Before any coding takes place on a major project, the developers should come together to actually determine what is it that is being coded. After that has been determined, the next thing is to plan the fastest (and most creative) way to produce the actual piece of code. After a plan is made, programming work can begin with everybody on the same page, so to speak.” What we’ve learned Code should be written for humans, not just for computers. What’s your definition of good code? Let us know in the comments section below. And if you liked these expert insights, check out our article about . managing deadlines This article was originally published on the ButterCMS blog . ButterCMS is a hosted API-first CMS and blog engine that lets you build CMS-powered apps.

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